VMware Site Recovery Manager – DNS Stalls for 20 minutes.

Chris Monfet sent over a handy setting for those of us leveraging VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to protect our Active Directory infrastructures.

I was running a bubble test tonight in preparation for the main bubble test this week. Ran into an issue with the AD/DNS starting up on the VM that is being replicated for this purpose. DNS wouldn’t start on the server even after a 2nd reboot.

Found the MS article below and adding the RegKey they suggest in the first resolution. It does work after a reboot and AD/DNS functions normally after that. Useful if you run into that again.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2001093

The most obvious symptom of this is DNS Event ID 4013 in a servers Event Log. You would also encounter a 15 – 25 minute delay while bringing up your Domain Controllers (assuming integrated DNS) during your SRM Recovery process.

The Microsoft kb article is a handy one to go through to make sure your Active Directory DC/DNS servers are set up correctly to avoid issues during failover when all DCs will be unreachable at the same time.